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THURSDAY, October 31, 2013 — The British Medical Journal released a report today that suggests if Britain taxed sugary beverages by 20 percent, it could reduce the number of obese Brits by 1.3 percent and cut the number of overweight countrymen by .9 percent. While this study simulated conditions in the UK, Jason Block, MD, assistant professor of population medicine at Harvard University wrote an editorial in BMJ explaining what it could mean for Americans. Everyday Health spoke with Dr. Block about the study and sugar taxes, and even the potential large soda ban in New York City.

Everyday Health: The study out today models how a 20 percent tax on sweetened beverages could drive down obesity — are the results promising?

So I think it’s promising, but I think it’s also pretty clear that if we want to address obesity across the world, it’s going to take a pretty comprehensive strategy. A sugar beverage tax maybe should be part of that comprehensive strategy, but it’s not going to be the only answer.

JB: The studies that have been done in the U.S. have found a tax would likely have a bigger effect than the UK study. One reason is that people in the U.S. drink more soda and drink more sugary beverages than they do in the UK. So if a tax reduces consumption of that, it’s going to have a bigger effect in a place where there’s greater consumption.

EH: The study focused on weight loss — is it also possible that the tax halted continued weight gain? What are some other possible impacts?

JB: When you look at just the obesity and overweight rates, you actually miss a decent part of the population. The idea is if you get people to stop drinking soda, or another sugary beverage, that’s probably going to have an impact on any person who decides to do it, so any person would probably lose some weight doing that. It’s a prevention strategy too, in that it may prevent people from gaining weight.

EH: You write that the actual financial impact on consumers is small. How does it still work to deter people from the purchases? Should the tax be higher to have more of an impact?

JB: The concept certainly is that the higher the tax, the more of an impact it will have. People often talk about a 20 percent tax; other people talk about a 1 cent per ounce tax. While they’re reasonably sized taxes — though the 20 percent tax is a pretty big one — they’re not outlandish, they’re in the realm of possibility politically. So the talk about a bigger tax is probably getting beyond the likelihood that you’re going to see something like that happen in terms of a policy.

EH: If a tax was implemented, is there another obesity-fighting measure that the money raised could be spent on?

JB: I think that’s the most clear effect of a tax — that it would create revenue. Some people have proposed taxes for that purpose alone, regardless of the public health implications. If you look at what’s currently around in terms of soda taxes or sugary beverage taxes [33 states have them and several countries do as well], most of them are quite small.

Most places have not really proposed a tax like that discussed in this paper, which would have two purposes. It would raise revenue but also affect public health in a meaningful way. So I think that those are two metrics that should be looked at: what revenue does it raise, and does it have a public health impact? The small taxes don’t seem to have much of a public health impact, but they do raise revenue.

In terms of what the money would be raised for, it would be great if that money could be used for public health, or at least could stay in public health.

JB: We have not seen a restriction like that Mayor Bloomberg proposed be implemented. So I think we really don’t have any idea what effect that would have yet. Taxes have been studied rather extensively, and there’s a lot of data where you can look at the likely effect of a tax like we’ve done in our case study. But the soda restriction — I don’t know.

I think it’s an innovative and interesting strategy. It’s certainly gotten a lot of people talking about the influence of sugary beverages on obesity rates in the United States.

There are communities that are enhancing places where people can safely go for physical activity and increasing bike paths and changing the general culture about making communities more structured around health and wellness than pure transportation. These are signals to communities and societies about what’s important, and what people should be focused on in terms of improving their health and wellness.

There are lots of things that are moving forward more in places like Europe than in the US. They’re also doing things like restricting advertising of certain food types and beverage types. And we haven’t really been able to do too much of that in the United States because of some of the concerns about First Amendment issues, but those are strategies too that might be very good, because we know that advertising definitely has strong impacts on children’s intake.

The question is: Can we start making any progress on all of these things at once? That’s ultimately going to be the thing that starts driving down obesity rates rather than focusing on one thing or the other.

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